As youngsters, Brandon Hegedus and his siblings were discouraged from watching too much television. They also didn’t have any video games to occupy their time. While they did have a trampoline in their southwest Calgary yard, “My older brother and I were often in the workshop tinkering with small wood projects, and we had a go-kart,” Hegedus recalls.
While the workshop was a simple single-car garage, it was well-organized and filled with tools including a band saw and a welder. “My dad would bring home new tools, he’d show us in a general sense how to use them, and then we’d figure out how to really run them,” he says.
Hegedus, 38, now lives in Airdrie with his wife, and they have four daughters all under the age of 12. Essentially self-taught with the tools, Hegedus has transferred all of those youthful hours in his dad’s workshop into a seriously cool hobby. In his own 22-foot by 22-foot garage, he’s begun building ‘tribute’ vehicles that pay homage to some of his favourite European cars. His first tribute build, completed in four-and-a-half years, was a 1962 Ferrari 156 ‘Sharknose’ Formula 1 race car. He’s now working on a 1966 Ferrari Dino 206S/SP sports prototype racing car.
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“My first personal vehicle was a 1989 Dodge Caravan minivan that I’d modified with a turbocharged engine,” Hegedus says of his early adventures with cars. “When the van was sent to the scrapyard, I put the turbo engine into a little Dodge Omni.”
He was able to sell the Omni and put the cash into constructing a 1927 Ford rat rod powered by a Cummins Turbo Diesel. That was followed by a ’27 Ford Roadster for his brother, a ’26 Ford sedan and a ’29 Roadster with a rotary engine.
“Each car I build is fifty per cent better than the last car,” Hegedus says, and adds, “I really enjoy the learning, and the hands-on process of building it, that’s my favourite part of it all. But the problem is, I (do) end up with a car at the end of it. Halfway through whatever my current project is, I’m already thinking about the next one.”
When he sold the ’27 Cummins Turbo Diesel rat rod, he invested the money in the Ferrari 156 tribute.
Hegedus says, “Going from rat rods to an F1-style car, that was really out of my realm. Although I grew up liking hot rods, I quickly realized that everything’s been done in that culture. My philosophy is if you’re going to spend time and money building something, make it something really worthwhile and make it unique.”
To create the Ferrari 156, Hegedus studied photographs of the cars that were originally built in 1961 and 1962. At the end of an unsuccessful racing season in ’62, and after a walkout by his engineering team, Enzo Ferrari ordered all of the cars destroyed. No original examples remained.
“I built a frame table, and didn’t have any plans for any of this,” Hegedus explains. “It was all from my head.”
He bent up and welded together a full tube chassis and worked out all of the correct suspension geometry. A mid-engine vehicle, Hegedus powered his tribute 156 with a 1,300cc inline four-cylinder 2003 Suzuki Hayabusa powerplant.
“I built every single thing, other than the shocks, wheels and tires and engine,” Hegedus says. “It was all either built by hand, including suspension components and the carbon fibre body, or highly modified from another source.”
Estimating he spends approximately four hours an evening, four nights a week and half of a Saturday in his shop, just last November, Hegedus began building his second tribute Ferrari, the ‘66 Dino 206S/SP. Nine months later, he’s got a rolling chassis powered by a highly modified V6 Nissan 350Z engine. It’s running, and Hegedus has been able to test drive it in a private lot.
“I’m right at the point where I’ll begin carving the form to take the mould for the carbon fibre body,” Hegedus says. “From this point on, it’ll likely take me another year of work before it’s completed. The only thing I outsourced on the Sharknose car was the paint, but this car I will paint myself.”
He does intend to drive the ’66 tribute car and will make it road legal, and says he’ll occasionally drive it to work at True Custom Kitchens and Millwork in Calgary, where Hegedus is a cabinetmaker with his brother.
Regularly posting to Instagram under @howisthatstreetlegal, Hegedus says he often gets asked questions by a younger generation, who aren’t formally trained, about how to get started building something like he does.
“You can figure it out on a budget,” he replies to them. “You can be an average person, with an average income, and make it work. Do your research first, be smart about it, and do it.”
He concludes, “I’m not an engineer, I’m not a math genius. And I’m not rich. That’s why I build all of my own parts.”
Greg Williams is a member of the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada (AJAC). Have a column tip? Contact him at 403-287-1067 or gregwilliams@shaw.ca
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